Packets: Surfing Surveillance

You can start a holy war arguing whether businesses have the right to
monitor employees’ Internet use — even though many workers do utilize
the corporate Internet connection to access inappropriate content, such
as adult sites.

I’m not, however, going to get into that here. Instead, I’ll examine
SuperScout for Business, one of SurfControl’s Internet usage monitoring
applications, then let you decide if this tool will fit in to your organization.

SuperScout is an extremely scalable Internet usage monitoring tool that’s
equally effective on small and enterprise networks. Using agents on the
Domain Controller, SuperScout can monitor all of your network’s users.
When a user logs onto the network and accesses resources, the SuperScout
agent connects to the agent running on that user’s computer and monitors
any Internet usage. In addition, depending on your network’s topology,
you can configure SuperScout in various ways — for example, via arrays.

Several tools ship with SuperScout. These range from a real-time monitor
and rules administrator (for configuring Web sites to be monitored) to
database-creation tools (for configuring a SQL database to store the data
SuperScout gathers). With this database, SuperScout allows you to create
reports quickly. Report types include the Top 10 e-mail users, Internet
use by department, daily user access to the Internet, and usage by day.

Another nifty tool, the SuperScout Monitor, allows you to see what sites
are being accessed by a specific user, computer or group. Here, you can
monitor the Web sites visited, pages within a site visited, and the amount
of time a user has spent browsing a particular site.

The database SuperScout uses to categorize Web sites contains some 1.4
million site addresses, which are regularly updated. This may seem like
a large number, but as the Internet continues to grow at an exponential
rate, the SuperScout database really covers just a fraction of the sites
out there. This is a limitation of the application. You’re also bound
by someone else’s vision of how sites should be rated, which may differ
from your view. You can filter by keywords, but you might run into problems
here as well. A targeted keyword, “sexual,” let’s say, may prohibit users
from visiting an otherwise “permitted” Web site, for example, one dealing
with sexual harassment in the workplace.

With SuperScout's Monitor application, you can
watch user, group and computer access to the Internet. (Click image
to view larger version.)

Even with the above limitations, as I took SuperScout for Business on
a test drive, I found it did, indeed, fulfill its promise: It quickly
and efficiently monitors Internet usage on your network. It’s no surprise,
then, that SurfControl is a leader when it comes to providing Web usage
monitoring tools.